Recently revealed was the news that both Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and Call of Duty: Ghosts require Day-One updates so that the games may run natively in 1080p (1980×1080 for the PlayStation 4.
As per Eurogamer and Polygon, the single-player campgain was reported to orignally run at 720p natively, which conflicted with earlier statements by Activision that the PlayStation 4 game would run at 1080p natively. Activision representatives have since contacted both Polygon and Eurogamer, reaffirming that the PS4 version of Ghosts does indeed run at 1080p, but a software update/patch will be released Day 1 to up the resolution to 1080p. According to the representative, this is due to “a configuration issue in the retail version on single-player mode only. This has been addressed with a day-one software update. People will be able to download the day one update when PlayStation 4 launches in their territory and play at native 1080p.” Otherwise, the single player campaign will run in 720p native upscaled to 1080p.
Another recent tidbit about the PlayStation 4 version of Call of Duty: Ghosts was a recent tweet by Infinity Ward stating that installing high-resolution texture will be downloaded in the background “once the disk is in your system”, taking between 10-30 minutes. According to Infinity Ward, “Unfortunately, there’s no way to see the progress of when it’s complete. Once complete, you’ll see the high-res textures in-game.”
Another game that recently revealed it would release a software patch/update to up the resolution to 1080p native was Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, according to a blog post by Ubisoft. According to Ubisoft, the game unpatched runs at 900p natively. Why? “To meet an essential goal: deliver a visually brilliant game at a steady 30 frames per second (the industry gold standard for open-world games). Finishing the game at 900p gave the development team the extra room in terms of the GPU and CPU usage to ensure the framerate never dips below 30 frames per second. The team then used the time between the ship date and the release to focus on a title update that could deliver native 1080p resolution on the PS4.” Also according to Ubisoft, the developers developed “a brand-new anti-aliasing technique” that will be available to both the PS4 and Xbox One, reducing jaggies even more.
